TIME Names Elon Musk — The World’s Richest Person — as ‘Person of the Year’

TIME magazine has named the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, as their “Person of the Year” for 2021.

Musk’s massive wealth accumulated over the past few years is not the reason why he has been given this honorific, though the write-up announcing it seems to address it head-on. The lady doth protest too much, methinks?

Edward Felsenthal, Editor in Chief of TIME, opens his write up thusly:

Despite shattering records this year with a net worth above $300 billion, Elon Musk demurs at being described as the richest person in the history of the world. “Excluding sovereigns,” Musk says wryly, adding that Russia’s Vladimir Putin is likely richer than he. “I can’t invade countries and stuff.”

Felsenthal quickly aims to put the massive wealth aside in explaining why Musk earned the year-end cover, adding:

For nearly a century, TIME has named a Person of the Year—the individual or group who most shaped the previous 12 months, for better or for worse. Person of the Year is a marker of influence, and few individuals have had more influence than Musk on life on Earth, and potentially life off Earth too. In 2021, Musk emerged not just as the world’s richest person but also as perhaps the richest example of a massive shift in our society. From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos to Facebook turned Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, the year brought home the extent to which, at a time of rising protest over ever deepening inequality, our lives and many of the basic structures around them are now shaped by the pursuits, products and priorities of the world’s wealthiest people.

So Musk IS massively wealthy, but amidst the “rarified crowd” of multi-billionaires, Musk is in a “class of his own,” Felsenthal argues:

He sees his mission as solving the globe’s most intractable challenges, along the way disrupting multiple industries across two decades. These include what was once the core American creation, combustion-engine automobiles, and what was once the core American aspiration, spaceflight, as well as a litany of other manifestations of our present and future: infrastructure construction, artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, payment systems and increasingly money itself through his dalliances with cryptocurrencies.

Not one lie is detected above. What follows is a recognition of his provocative persona which “often seems to revel in division and aggressive mockery,” but, hey! Don’t hate the player, hate the game, amirite?